In 1935, Wong was dealt the most severe disappointment of her career, when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer refused to consider her for the leading role of the Chinese character O-Lan in the film version of Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth. MGM instead cast Luise Rainer to play the leading role in yellowface. One biographer believes that the choice was due to the Hays Code anti-miscegenation rules requiring the wife of a white actor, Paul Muni (ironically playing a Chinese character in yellowface) to be played by a white actress.[6] But the 1930-1934 Hays Code of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America insisted only that "miscegenation (sex relationship between the white and black races) was forbidden" and said nothing about Asian/white intermarriages.[7] Other biographers have not corroborated this theory, including historian Shirley Jennifer Lim's Anna May Wong: Performing the Modern.[8] MGM screen-tested Wong for the supporting role of Lotus, the seductress, but it is ambiguous whether she refused the role on principle or was rejected.[9]

Different times